the invisible blogger

Like Noorster (and probably every other blogger), I metablog -- her great word for blogging in your head. Not that metablogging is much use to my handful of faithful readers who have found me in absentia for the past two weeks. I apologize.

Where have I been and why haven't I been writing it down? I must try to spare you my usual litany of up-early-aggravating-drive-to-work, etc. etc. because if you're here now you've heard it all before and are hoping I'll say something different for a change, but really I don't have that much of a life; this really is my boring life.

How boring? I'm spending spare minutes when not at work or playing Scrabble with my nearly 13-yr-old daughter reading the last Harry Potter. Not the new one -- the LAST one, book 5, the Order of the Phoenix. By the time it came out two years ago I had gotten bored with him (sorry, the TriWizard Tournament just didn't do it for me) and just wasn't in the mood to read any more. It's been sitting on my shelf ever since (along with who-cares-how-many-books-I-own). But now with all the hype over book 6, I found I was missing dear Harry and started in again. As usual, I hate putting it down but have only had time to get through about a third so far. If you really want to know, you book-meme-cultists, magical type plots have fascinated me since childhood, and that's the sort of stuff I've always gobbled with relish. As with so many with a tendency toward being a loner, books like these were my best friends. Harry Potter takes me back to those satisfying times of whole weekends immersed in the latest find from the library.

Not much has changed, but I hardly read fiction anymore. If I do, it's usually something like the Da Vinci Code, or The Red Tent, or Bridget Jones' Diary, that absolutely everybody has already read before me and one can't help feeling one is missing out on a cultural touchstone if one doesn't read it.

For at least the past 20 years, I've tended toward philosophical-psychological stuff. The problem with this stuff is that, while absolutely fascinating, it's so heavy that I can't usually read more than a couple of pages before I fall asleep (the time I usually manage to read). For much of the past year, I've been dipping into Ernest Becker's "Escape from Evil" and "Denial of Death", both amazing works. If I try to read earlier, I get interrupted by some family activity anyway. So I have a permanent pile of extremely heavy reading material on my bedside table, which is gazed at lovingly and will Definitely Get Read Someday. Unfortunately, I have trouble allowing myself to read lighter stuff while these other jewels await me. Tis a conundrum, a little bit of a painful one, as are all my issues involving friends. Enough said about books for the moment.

I could tell you what's happening at work. But I'll leave that for another time, since I'm not there today and won't be tomorrow either. The special occasion: Little Ms. Squarepeg is heading off on a 4-week adventure to Canada tomorrow afternoon, all alone. She'll be met by my/her Toronto family and Victoria, BC family, but she's taking a huge independent leap and will be without her mom or dad for a month. This is a major milestone in our lives, and certainly there's some trepidation, but lots of excitement and trust that we're all big enough to meet the challenge.

So for the next 4 weeks, there should be no excuse for not blogging. Watch this space.